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Founders: #160 Peter Cundill

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What I learned from reading Routines and Orgies: The Life of Peter Cundill, Financial Genius, Philosopher, and Philanthropist by Christopher Risso-Gill. ---- Excellence as a goal in itself had been drummed into him from early boyhood. I’m convinced that to achieve real greatness a person needs above all to have passion but at the same time immense discipline, concentration, patience and an unshakeable determination to become a master of his craft. There is a choice of courses in life: either to seek equilibrium or to enjoy the heights and suffer the depths. You need to get into some situations which make your gut tight and your balls tingle. Do the unappealing things first. Once you have done your homework properly and are absolutely convinced that an investment is right you should not hesitate or wait for others to share the adventure. The price at which you start buying will almost invariably be imperfect but that should never discourage you. Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habi

[00:00:00] This book is a biography, not an investment manual. But those seeking insights into the thinking of one of the greatest value investors of all time will find it has much to offer. It is more by way of an epic, describing a journey that spanned more than 70 years, most corners of the globe, and a broad array of human endeavor, commercial, artistic, romantic, and adventurous. It is a tale of hard-won professional development, extraordinary challenges faced and survived, sometimes only barely so. [00:00:35] It is supported by 44 years of meticulously kept daily journals, written in…

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